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The Choice
by
His pain, whatever its cause, might be muted by the drugs, but it wouldn’t be resolved. He might feel better, or feel less—which we often mistake for feeling better—but he would not be healed.
“No world is rock real. As a certain poet in Dublin once said to me when, as a young journalist, I was emerging one enchanted evening, from a reception in a fashion-modelling agency, and had marvelled to him about the unreality, or it seemed to me to be, of the world in which those beautiful creations pirouetted.
No world, the poet said sadly, is rock real.”
― Drink to the Bird
No world, the poet said sadly, is rock real.”
― Drink to the Bird
“Repentance is not concerned with consequences. This is what distinguishes it from remorse, which is inspired principally by fear of unpleasant consequences”
― The Priest Is Not His Own
― The Priest Is Not His Own
“I miss the freedom of London. I do miss the mixture. I think I will go back sometime with Alexandra and show her the city. She will understand why I went. And perhaps why I came back.”
― Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now - As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It, and Long for It
― Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now - As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It, and Long for It
“When you do a departure along the northerly from Gatwick, you get a real sense of humanity. As you climb out over the city, you can see masses of people down there, all the buildings and all the built-up area are lit up. And at night-time you’ve got the M25, which circles London, and you can see all these little beady lights that are dotted around in a very windy circle and you realize that it’s six o’clock around the M25. Day by day they’re down there and you just think of the effort, all the effort, just to get by. It’s a tough city. All those little dots, those beads of light, like a rosary, all those people, wanting to get in, wanting to get out.”
― Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now - As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It, and Long for It
― Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now - As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It, and Long for It
“Conscience is always enlightened when sin is seen as hurting someone we love. No sin can touch one of God’s stars or silence one of His words, but it can cruelly wound His heart. Once the Penitent understands this truth, he can see why he has such emptiness and desolation and his soul: he hurt the one he loves.”
― The Priest Is Not His Own
― The Priest Is Not His Own
Benedict’s 2025 Year in Books
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